How do I keep up with current written English language?
I am a speaker of English as a foreign language. I appreciate that English is a living language and that different regions in the world use English differently. I wanted to know how I can keep up with written English, style choices, popular sayings, words often used, etc. A dictionary seems to get outdated pretty soon. I'm also not sure if there really is an authoritative source, or if the development of the language is more grassroots and less structured.
My question is: Is there some website you can recommend or some other way to keep up to date with current English?
If that is too broad, let it be limited to American English, because that seems to be what is mostly used on the Internet. Also, I'm mostly interested in creative writing.
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Read. Read more. Listen. Listen more.
Luckily, there is no one place to suggest as an answer. If there was- the language would be dying.
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You can find urbandictionary.com useful. Probably that's the only adequate source of evolving English language available.
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I enjoy reading Michael Quinion's World Wide Words e-mail newsletter. Quinion works on the Oxford English Dictionary and has written a number of popular books on English besides. The newsletter ranges widely through the various dialects of English and often covers archaic, newly minted, and regional words. Often he tracks down the origin of an idiom, which he always documents authoritatively when possible.
I can't really imagine being interested in English (or writing in the language) without subscribing to World Wide Words.
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If you want to keep up with written English, read newspapers and magazines (preferably weekly, but also monthly).
Newspapers, meant to be daily, cover news, politics, opinions, business, human interest, tech, medicine, sports, and entertainment (among many other subjects). New terms can enter from any angle.
Magazines can either be weekly or monthly. Weekly magazines will be a little fresher with their use of slang; monthly magazines are usually more niche-oriented and will be heavier with jargon from a particular industry or hobby. If some phrase has reached a monthly magazine, it's more likely to be entrenched in the lexicon, since publication lead time is two to three months.
Most periodicals have websites where some or all of their content is reproduced.
Entertainment periodicals will have more creative writing than news outlets, but you can find creative writing in the opinion sections as well. Monthly magazines can have a fiction component.
Just off the top of my head, I can suggest (note that this does not imply endorsement of content):
- The New York Times
- The Los Angeles Times
- The Washington Post
- The Chicago Tribune
- Entertainment Weekly
- Newsweek
- Time
- The New Yorker
- The Atlantic
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